USA TODAY: …Al Jazeera America, the latest offshoot of the Al Jazeera media conglomerate funded by the government of oil-rich Qatar, is buying its way into the lucrative U.S. market. After paying about $500 million in January for Current TV, a struggling cable network founded by Al Gore, Al Jazeera is gutting the channel and installing its own brand of news programming. It will be an entirely new network focused on U.S. domestic news and will be run separately from Al Jazeera English, which will be phased out in the U.S.
Now that the launch is barely a week away, the pace has picked up at AJAM. Nearly all 850 employees budgeted for the debut have been hired, including writers and editors for its website: www.aljazeera.com/america. (Several former USA TODAY reporters are among those hired by the network.)
It has opened 12 bureaus across the U.S., with reporters filing stories for rehearsal programs. The bureaus are in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C… (more)
